Arielle Diaz and boyfriend, Alexander Gloe, check out “Lamp Beside the Golden Door” art installation during Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio on Friday, April 14, 2017. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Morgan Demeola, of Los Angeles, looks at her reflection on the “Lamp Beside the Golden Door” art installation during Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio on Friday, April 14, 2017. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

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Festival goers walk around the Is This What Brings Things Into Focus? art installation, by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA., Saturday, April 15, 2017. (Staff photo by Jennifer Cappuccio Maher/The Sun/SCNG)

A couple share a moment in front of Chiaozza Garden art during Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio on Friday, April 14, 2017. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Art installation “Crown Ether” lights up as festival-goers walk along the polo field during Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio on Friday, April 14, 2017. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Vittoria Nelli, of Studio City, takes a picture at the “Lamp Beside The Golden Door” art installation, by Gustavo Prado, during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA., Friday, April 14, 2017. (Staff photo by Jennifer Cappuccio Maher/The Sun/SCNG)

Festival goers walk by the Chiaozza Garden art installation, by Chiaozza, during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA., Friday, April 14, 2017. (Staff photo by Jennifer Cappuccio Maher/The Sun/SCNG)

While the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has always revolved around music, the festival’s most unique and enduring images – and those most likely to grace fans’ selfies and profile pictures – are the large-scale art installations.

This year’s four major art works, including one that’s 75 feet tall and another that takes up more than an acre of the grassy festival grounds at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, are all about architectural scale and visual impact, said Raffi Lehrer, associate art director for the festival.

Coachella wraps up its first weekend Sunday, April 16, with anticipated sets from rapper Kendrick Lamar and movie composer Hans Zimmer before its encore starts on Friday, April 21. Art-driven pop icon Lady Gaga headlined Saturday, April 15, performing on the main stage, in the periphery of the art pieces.

Tall, boxy animal shapes that look like piñatas wearing party hats loom over one part of the grounds, while another is populated with colorful stucco gourd-shaped plants. A popular selfie spot is a metal frame holding 2,120 convex and concave mirrors.

While last year’s festival featured six pieces, this year “We went for scale and more expansive work,” Lehrer said.

Also unlike last year, none of the artwork at Coachella 2017 appears overtly political. In 2016, “Katrina Chairs” suggested communities left stranded by the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans, and “Besame Mucho” aimed to promote cross-border love and acceptance.

The festival works with the artists it commissions to develop the pieces, but the goal isn’t to make a political statement, Lehrer said.

“Especially in this day and age, everyone’s so inundated with news and politics” that Coachella is intended to be a respite from political conflict, he said.

The art on the grounds this year is more whimsical and confectionary, but it remains a key part of the Coachella experience.

“I think it’s like the perfect setting for it,” said Alyanna Tekulve, 23, who came from Salt Lake City with her husband, Drew, 25, to the festival’s first weekend.

“You’re out here all day, so at least they can have awesome things to look at.”

The Tekulves were admiring “Crown Ether,” a 50-foot work resembling a colorful treehouse village elevated on thick, angular trunks. After seeing it lit up on Friday night, they had to come back Saturday for another look.

Brooklyn-based artist Olalekan Jeyifous, who created “Crown Ether,” said he prefers a venue where people can interact with his work to a “white box gallery.”

Lehrer said that interplay between festival goers and art is one of the goals, but he also hopes to give a broader audience access to art.

“They’re landmarks during the show, a point to congregate and find your friends, and after the show it becomes the icon of that year,” Lehrer said.

When the fans have gone home and the tents have come down and the stages are disassembled, he said, “All we’ll have to remember this by are the photos.”

The 2,120 security mirrors and 35-foot metal frame used to create the piece were “all kinds of materials that you can go to Home Depot and get,” said artist Gustavo Prado, a native of Brazil who moved to the U.S. about six years ago.

His piece, “The Lamp Beside the Golden Door,” is “a sort of entry gate where you get scrutinized” as an immigrant coming to America would, but also as a lighthouse that beckons and welcomes the viewer, Prado said Saturday, April 15, in between taking photos of people looking at his sculpture and warning them not to climb on it or try to move the mirrors.

The work’s title borrows a line from “The New Colossus,” a poem by Emma Lazarus that is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Prado said he’s grateful for the opportunity to come to the U.S., which has welcomed artists from around the world, and he hopes his work will reaffirm the country’s promise of openness, but he preferred a subtle approach.

“I really wanted people to go look for the poem,” he said. “Maybe the poem itself and where it’s placed would carry the message.”

Like an elevated treehouse village that offers shade and a gathering spot to viewers underneath, artist Olalekan Jeyifous’s “Crown Ether” serves as a spot for Coachella goers to meet and rest. That personal connection delights Jeyifous.

At 50 feet high, it’s the biggest piece the Nigerian-born, Brooklyn-based artist, 39, has ever done, but it’s based on his previous architectural collages, he said in a telephone interview Saturday.

The structure, painted plywood cladding on a structural steel frame, depicts a community held aloft, like a luxury high-rise sitting apart from the less upscale but heritage-rich community where it’s built. But his creation seeks to establish a connection between the community above and the one below through the benefits of safety and shade, Jeyifous said.

Bringing his work to Coachella was exciting and made him want to create other large-scale pieces that viewers can interact with, he said.

“I’m much more about everyone engaging with the artwork than a select few,” he said. “At this point I consider it out of my hands and I’m much more interested in people enjoying it.”

The 31 colorful, towering plants of the “Chiaozza Garden” art installation are anything but subtle. However, they still fit harmoniously into the desert landscape, lending a playful, friendly note to the festival grounds amid the 90-degree heat and harsh sunlight.

The alien-like bulbous structures are made of stucco and painted in bright pastel shades – pinks and oranges, blues and greens. They cast immense shadows in which festival goers lie down and nap. Couples take selfies against the colorful stems. Some gaze at one or two of the more exuberant gourds topped with tassels and compare the shapes to female anatomy, to the sights at a burlesque show.

The installation reminds Connie Calimbas and Katie Capello, both from Long Beach, of a garden drawn by Dr. Seuss.

“It’s like a children’s playground,” Calimbas said. “It gives off good festival vibes.”

Capello said she appreciates the soft shapes and bright colors. “I wasn’t expecting something like this after last year’s art,” she said. “It’s not as structured – more fun.”

Festivalgoers received do-it-yourself cardboard cutouts of the art pieces in their Coachella ticket package. The mini replicas didn’t have the same optical art graphics on the larger-than-life pieces, though.

“I thought it was really cool that they incorporated these here and into the boxes,” said Jessy Evaristo, 20 of San Luis Obispo.

Alicia Robinson covers cities and local government for the Orange County Register. She has also reported at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, the Daily Pilot in Costa Mesa, and at small daily and weekly papers in the midwest, before she became an honorary Californian based on hours spent in traffic. Besides government and policy, she's interested in animals both wild and domestic, people who try to make the world better, and how things work.